KILKENNY -- I passed a significant milestone yesterday when the 20,000th person viewed my images on Flickr. It's a big deal for me because more than any other technology, photo-sharing has resulted in me meeting more people from different cultures. At least once a week, someone goes from one of my 1000 Flickr images, to one of my blogs and then into an instant messaging program to chat. This friendly meeting arrangement has brought Chinese students to Ireland, an Italian web designer with a backpack to Kerry, and six Americans on holiday into Kilkenny. That's the way this internet thing is supposed to work and it's marvelous that you can see results through your camera.
Remarkably, Flickr still tells people it's in beta. Flickr.com has more than 250,000 members and it's growing at nearly 10% each week. Last week, the system had 5m photos online and 80% of them were open to all viewers. (You can hide your photos from view or share them with family at your discretion.) The system uploads around 60,000 new photos a day. I've sent them via an upload tool, a webform and I've mailed them to Flickr. In my experience, Flickr remains one of the best examples of the Read-Write Web.
- "Most viewed" (4718 views) is Kalutara Beach after the tsunami. Like many Flickr users, I discovered that Creative Commons Licensing allows you to build favourites on the back of popular images snapped elsewhere.
- "Most favorited" is the Rock of Cashel with six people calling the Rock a fav.
- The image receiving the most amount of comments (5 comments) is Clonmel Sunset.
- Most visited geotagged image is Garden Work on Flickr If you don't know about geotagging, you should click on the image and then follow the "geotagged" hyperlink to the place where Flickr meets Google Maps.
Some information from my photostream follows.
Flickr has helpful fora. That's one reason it's the best photo-sharing program in the world.
Tip of the hat to James Corbett for starting me on geotagging.
